Hagedorn temperature

The Hagedorn temperature, TH, is the temperature in theoretical physics where hadronic matter (i.e. ordinary matter) is no longer stable, and must either "evaporate" or convert into quark matter; as such, it can be thought of as the "boiling point" of hadronic matter. It was discovered by Rolf Hagedorn. The Hagedorn temperature exists because the amount of energy available is high enough that matter particle (quark–antiquark) pairs can be spontaneously pulled from vacuum. Thus, naively considered, a system at Hagedorn temperature can accommodate as much energy as one can put in, because the formed quarks provide new degrees of freedom, and thus the Hagedorn temperature would be an impassable absolute hot. However, if this phase is viewed as quarks instead, it becomes apparent that the matter has transformed into quark matter, which can be further heated. The Hagedorn temperature, TH, is about 150MeV/kB or about 1.7e12K, little above the mass–energy of the lightest hadrons, the pion. Matter at Hagedorn temperature or above will spew out fireballs of new particles, which can again produce new fireballs, and the ejected particles can then be detected by particle detectors. This quark matter has been detected in heavy-ion collisions at SPS and LHC in CERN (France and Switzerland) and at RHIC in Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA). In string theory, a separate Hagedorn temperature can be defined for strings rather than hadrons. This temperature is extremely high (1030 K) and thus of mainly theoretical interest. The Hagedorn temperature was discovered by German physicist Rolf Hagedorn in the 1960s while working at CERN. His work on the statistical bootstrap model of hadron production showed that because increases in energy in a system will cause new particles to be produced, an increase of collision energy will increase the entropy of the system rather than the temperature, and "the temperature becomes stuck at a limiting value". Hagedorn temperature is the temperature TH above which the partition sum diverges in a system with exponential growth in the density of states.